Social Panoramas: Changing the Unconscious Landscape with NLP and Psychotherapy

We know that we create our own reality, built on how we interpret the world through our beliefs and experiences. Here, Lucas Derks explores the notion that we possess an unconscious landscape, across which the people, issues and relationships of our lives are distributed:
“…everything a person believes, wants, values or fears plays a role in the shapes their mental images take”.
The location of another person, event or image within the client’s mental space, his Social Panorama, indicates its relative importance or influence, and determines its emotional quality and impact on the client’s life. The therapist supports the client to notice and interpret where and how people, events or images appear: are they directly in front or to one side, close or distant, at ground level of floating, static or in motion?
The coaching consideration is whether people in the client’s Social Panorama (“Personifications”) are positioned in a way that assists or obstructs them. Where would the client prefer a domineering boss or a loving parent to be? How are groups, teams, families or indeed a spiritual dimension or non-human personification represented?
The power in Derks’ model is in the way the client can be supported to move Personifications to a place that creates new feelings and a new structure to the client’s perception. This process is, however one that must be undertaken with sensitivity and skill by the therapist, since all our representations are part of us, and the Personification cannot be removed entirely,
Lucas Derks makes comparisons with and draws upon several NLP core techniques such as parts integration, sub-modalities, perceptual positions, timelines, and associated/dissociated states. In addition to considerable depth of research and insight through many years of direct experience, Lucas Derks also provides many practical techniques to introduce Social Panorama work to practitioners.